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Lou Harrison - For Strings

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 05 Oct 2010 03:22:22 | Comments : 14
Lou Harrison - For Strings

Lou Harrison - For Strings
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 327 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2004 | Cover
The New Professionals Orchestra • Wu Man, pipa

“As the three pieces on this CD show, Harrison ranged far and wide. There are re-creations of medieval dances, strenuous fugues, slow movements with that wide-open prairie feel of Aaron Copland, and a sinuous, plaintive melodicism born out of Harrison's long study of Asian music. In the two Suites written in 1948 and 1960 there are moments of dark complication, but in later years he achieved a marvellous serenity, exemplified here by the Concerto for Pipa (a kind of Chinese mandolin). In this piece you find evocations of the Russian balalaika, Neapolitan folk-song and even a medieval dance. It sounds like the worst kind of cross-cultural mélange, but it's done with such simplicity that, miraculously, it comes off. The soloist is Wu Man, who is to the pipa what Ravi Shankar was to the sitar, and her performance has a winning delicacy and tact. And the strings of the New Professionals live up to their name, playing with scrupulous precision in the slow movements and incisive energy in the fast ones.
- Ivan Hewitt, The Times (London)
”
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Lou Harrison - Works 1939-2000

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 30 Sep 2010 22:48:45 | Comments : 10
Lou Harrison - Works 1939-2000

Lou Harrison - Works 1939-2000
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 284 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2003 | No cover
William Winant, percussion • Leta Miller, flutes & piccolo • Various musicians
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Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Mobile for Shakespeare

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 22 Sep 2010 14:19:13 | Comments : 5
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Mobile for Shakespeare

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Mobile for Shakespeare
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 177 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 1999 | Complete Scans
Ensemble Avantgarde • Beat Furrer, cond. • Leipziger Streichquartett

“These four examples from Haubenstock-Ramati's impressive oeuvre may convey an idea of the composer's inventiveness in finding ever-new ways of creating "dynamic-closed forms", one common trait links these (and many other) pieces: a penchant for small, fragile, filigree structures, for sonic miniatures.
- Peter Niklas Wilson
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Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Concerto A Tre

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 22 Sep 2010 01:13:02 | Comments : 6
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Concerto A Tre

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - Concerto A Tre
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 182 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 1999 | Complete Scans
Ensemble Recherche

“A fragile, transparent, fine network constitutes the vanishing point in Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's creations. That is why his chamber music pieces do not merely result from daily compositional exercises, but are the virtual essence of his life's work ... This dynamically explosive, chamber musically delicate Concerto a tre in any case musicalizes at its most beautiful what Haubenstock-Ramati always had in mind as a social utopian dream - the free communicating of responsible individuals, whose independently articulated parts join together, despite their great variety, into a harmonically unified network.
- Reinhard Kager
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Jo Kondo - Works for Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 21 Sep 2010 04:20:57 | Comments : 9
Jo Kondo - Works for Piano

Jo Kondo - Works for Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 258 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2001 | Complete Scans
Satoko Inoue

“The nine pieces recorded in this CD are all that I have written so far for solo piano. Until this recording project was proposed to me, I had been unaware of having written so many pieces for piano solo, enough to fill a whole CD. Although the piano is one of my favorite instruments, which I use almost constantly in my chamber works, I never thought the solo piano could become a major medium for my music. In fact, composition for any solo instrument has not interested me too much, probably because of my proclivity to write music for instrumental ensembles, where interrelationships among the parts (or the members of the ensemble) play a crucial role. This may somehow explain the fact that the first two pieces on this CD, Sight Rhythmics and Walk, were not originally written for solo piano.
- Jo Kondo, liner notes
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James Tenney - Music for Violin & Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 21 Sep 2010 02:19:48 | Comments : 4
James Tenney - Music for Violin & Piano

James Tenney - Music for Violin & Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 235 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 1999 | Complete Scans
Marc Sabat, violin • Stephen Clarke, piano

“"I'm not interested in musical emotion ... I don't have any interest in drama - in fact, I do everything I can to avoid it. I'm seeking a more basic level of perception, rather than taste and judgment. (I've done some pieces with ugly sounds. Ugly sounds can be useful too.)"
- James Tenney
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Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 07 Sep 2010 13:23:22 | Comments : 10
Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet

Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 250 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2001 | Complete Scans
Ives Ensemble

“And if the history of string quartet writing is the history of intimate conversation, of interaction, of independent voice-leading and democratic freedom of musical speech, Feldman negates all that by treating the strings of as a monolithic sound block [...] No less radical is Feldman's re-invention of the piano, his astonishing rejection of the qualities usually associated with the instrument. The notation already gives an indication of Feldman's idiosyncrasies: The piano part is written on one stave only, in treble clef. No independence of the two hands here, no counterpoint to speak of, but only an endless permutation of an exquisite six-note-chord stretched out (in its initial figure) over two octaves and a fourth. [...] Feldman himself has summed up Piano and String Quartet as "the history of the speed of a broken chord."
- Peter Niklas Wilson, liner notes
”
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John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 10: Etcetera

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 30 Jul 2010 23:41:11 | Comments : 6
John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 10: Etcetera

John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 10: Etcetera
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 200 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2002 | Cover
Steffen Schleiermacher • Andreas Seidel, violin
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John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 6: Pieces 1960-1992

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 30 Jul 2010 23:39:51 | Comments : 5
John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 6: Pieces 1960-1992

John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 6: Pieces 1960-1992
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 2 CDs / 315 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2001 | Cover
Steffen Schleiermacher
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John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 4: Pieces 1950-1960

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 30 Jul 2010 23:38:02 | Comments : 5
John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 4: Pieces 1950-1960

John Cage - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 4: Pieces 1950-1960
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 2 CDs / 277 MB | 1999 | Scans
Steffen Schleiermacher

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John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 24 Jul 2010 05:19:23 | Comments : 8
John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy

John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 2 CDs / 480 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2010 | Complete Scans
Ulrich Krieger • intersax and other musicians

“Art, at its best, is a reflection of the "core of the present" filtered through the subject of the artist. But beyond that, "timeless" art has the ability to conceive a vision for the future which reaches beyond the snapshot of the moment. Very early on Cage said goodbye to the traditional classical, dramatic, and semantic developmental structures that are still typical for post-serial new music in favor of an art which has nature as its model (star maps, streets, gardens, etc). Instead of linear and narrative compositions, multidimensional networks and proliferations of independent voices with mutual and indirect influences emerge. These are non-hierarchical, self-organizing, chaotic systems which can be presented and developed differently with each performance, but nevertheless have a general mood and structure - each performance is a snapshot of a possible state of the piece. It is like an intersection of streets which is always the same, but each time you pass it, it is different.
- Ulrich Krieger, liner notes
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Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works (1994)

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 26 May 2010 05:48:50 | Comments : 2
Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works

Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works (1994)
Classical | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 290 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | Complete Artwork
Nancy Armstrong, sop. • D'Anna Fortunato, mezzo • Anthony Tommasini, piano, etc.

“The neglect of Thomson's vocal works is inexplicable. There are close to 100 works - songs, duets, quartets, even a complete mass setting for solo voice. In the best of these, including those presented on this disc, the music is clear-headed, unmannered and direct. When the emotional content heats up, as in his proclamatory setting of Bossuet's Oraison funèbre, it never boils over, restrained by the French sensibility that Thomson, from his many years living in Paris, adopted into his own aesthetic. He selected literate, witty texts and set them with scrupulous clarity and conversational naturalness. In this way his vocal music is unabashedly American. European Romance languages have lilting sounds and long-short rhythms. English, particularly American English, is all jerky and asymmetrical. Thomson gloried in setting it just that way.
- Anthony Tommasini, liner notes
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Posted by :: Alex | Date :: Aug 20, 2008 19:05:00 | [ 34 comments ]


Bunita Marcus - Burnt by Bunny (2007)

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 17 May 2010 08:52:00 | Comments : 4
Bunita Marcus - Burnt by Bunny (2007)

Bunita Marcus - Burnt by Bunny (2007)
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 328 MB (WinRAR - 3% Recovery) | Cover
feat. Kronos Quartet, Aki Takahashi, & others

While the recordings featured here aren't of the greatest quality, the actual performances are deemed by Mrs. Marcus herself to be the best.
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Christian Wolff - Long Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 04 Mar 2010 05:09:42 | Comments : 4
Christian Wolff - Long Piano

Christian Wolff - Long Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 209 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2009 | Complete Scans
Thomas Schultz, piano

“David Tudor, with characteristic perspicacity, noticed the influence of children (of being a parent) in Christian Wolff's music-making. "While working with David Tudor on Burdocks, he said that he could see the results of having small kids around - my music had loosened up." Becoming a parent, bringing a human into the world, makes one more aware of ideological constraints and pressures. A domestic culture vies with a prevailing dominant culture which is predatory, aggressive, and individualistic, a day-to-day confrontation of irreconcilable attitudes . . . Music is an integral part of the fabric of our social existence. In the early Seventies raising a family coincided with a political involvement, expressed unequivocally in Wolff's music, moving (ideologically) from what he characterized as democratic libertarianism (anarchism) toward democratic socialism, which in one way or another was supported and promoted by the use of political songs and texts . . . Wolff criticized his own (earlier) music for being esoteric, too "introverted"; it did not address social reality. Above all, he tried in various ways to make his new, political music more accessible. "But my notion is that music can function better socially if it is more clearly identified with what most people recognize as music, which is not a question of liking or disliking, but of social identity." . . . Hanns Eisler discussed the subject with characteristic candor and insight. One of his favorite quotes was from The Damnation of Music by the philosopher Me-Ti, 600 years BC:

"If the nobles of the country really have the welfare of the people at heart, they should prevent and forbid music wherever it makes an appearance. For the fact that the people practise music has four disadvantages. The hungry are not fed, the cold are not clothed, the homeless are not sheltered and the desperate find no consolation."
- John Tilbury, liner notes
”
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Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 03 Mar 2010 17:13:42 | Comments : 6
Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano

Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 290 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2010 | Scans
Nicolas Hodges, piano • Recorded: 28-31 March 2005

“Voices and Piano, written for Nicolas Hodges, is an extensive cycle of pieces, each for a single recorded voice, mostly of a well-known celebrity, and piano. The cycle is still in progress and should eventually include about 80 pieces/voices (around 4 hours of music). The work is always meant to occur as a selection from the whole. At present I like to write works where the whole should not be presented at once. The whole should remain the whole, and what we hear is just a part of it.

I like to think about Voices and Piano as my song-cycle, though nobody is singing in it: the voices are all spoken statements from speeches, interviews or readings. And the piano is not really accompanying the voices: the relation of the two is more a competition or comparison. Speech and music is compared. We can also say: reality and perception. Reality/speech is continuous, perception/music is a grid which tries to approach the first. Actually the piano part is the temporal and spectral scan of the respective voice, something like a coarse gridded photograph. Actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice. Music analyses reality.
- Peter Ablinger, liner notes
”
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